Professional

Sun released version 1 of javaFX today - http://www.javafx.com/ Its a competitor to Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, but based on the java developer created demos it just does not look complelling enough to matter. Adobe had been making some great progress in the Flash virtual machine and the number of advances in Flash10 really impress the coder in me. As a development manager I’m seeing Actionscript programmers reach an impressive level of maturity, with unit testing, automated builds and solid object design. ...

I found an interesting article today. A House With No Front Door It is written by a product marketing professional lamenting about dealing with ‘resource constrained’ engineering teams. Seeing as how I come from a resource constrained engineering team I thought it was an interesting read. The premise of the article was the disconnect as described: Perhaps it is my job to get this perspective across to them, and I try to do that, but the gulf between the “feature triage” perspective that many engineers have, and the “holistic” customer or market perspective that is needed is enormous. ...

I was watching Kitchen Nightmares where Chef Gordon Ramsay verbally attacks restaurant owners in order to point out the areas where they lack. I used to think he was just another character on TV but there was a turning point in that episode. The owner was berating everyone around him and causing so much stress that his customers noticed and his business was failing. People from the Chef to the Hostess noticed the problems but they didn’t try to fix the core issue. This owner was a good enough chef to start a successful restaurant and then use that to open a second one in a beautiful space. ...

Arpit led another session about how and when to use Flash in an Ajax world. One of the attendees was a Microsoft Silverlight manager and was a solid hour of dispelling myths about RIA in general. There is still a large population that thinks Flash/Silverlight are bad for SEO and not enough people know of Adobe’s recent collaborations with Google and Microsoft, including project Ichabod that makes Flash more indexable than Ajax (some details here: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/adobe_ichabod_flash_ajax.php). We also talked about how the RIA vs traditional html choice is often made unconsciously before the IA/Design phase and what we need to do in order to help inform that choice. Arpit is going to have a conversation later with a manager from Microsoft concerning Rich Internet Application development in Philadelphia. ...

The BarCamp happened yesterday and Philly’s brightest and most enthusiastic ‘interative media’ professionals came out in force. Barcamp is a type of grass roots conference setup by the people bottom up rather then by a company top down. I talked a lot, learned a lot, drank a lot and made some friends in the process. Each session exceeded my expectations in different ways. My talk on the how we build and operate http://www.comcast.net was very well received and it was very telling to step up from the weeds and view this creation with my peers. As much as we need to move forward sometimes we at CIM forget how far we have come. Since this was an untelevised, ego and marketecture free event we openly discussed what we did right and wrong. Having this talk with people that live through this grind every day is very different then having it with people that learned the ‘right way to build websites’ from books or blogs. ...